The Biden administration steals from taxpayers to undercut Trump’s border wall
By Andrea Widburg www.americanthinker.com
When President Trump left office in 2021, he left America with the beginnings of a decent wall at the Southern border. The very first thing Biden did was to stop work on the wall and begin dismantling it. We now know that he did this, not because walls don’t work but because they do. Trump has announced that he’ll resume building the wall on his return to office, so the Biden administration has gotten busy stealing from taxpayers to stop that from happening.
James Lalino has the report on the scam:
The Biden administration is using its final weeks to haul a massive amount of border wall materials away from the southern border to be sold off in a government auction, an apparent effort to hinder President-elect Donald Trump’s effort to secure the border, The Daily Wire has learned.
Videos obtained exclusively by The Daily Wire from a U.S. Customs and Border Patrol agent show unused sections of the wall being hauled away on the back of flatbed trucks from a section of the border just south of Tucson, a hotspot for illegal crossings during the Biden administration. The agent estimates that up to half a mile per day of unused border wall is being moved.
[snip]
Trump made clear during his campaign that he intends to finish construction of the border wall, making use of the materials that have remained untouched at the border since President Joe Biden took office in 2021. If the material brought to the border during his first term is sold off, it will significantly delay any progress on one of Trump’s flagship campaign promises at the border.
You can read the whole thing here.
The bidding is starting off at $5 per panel, a price far below their replacement value. That means that, when Trump resumes building the wall, if the government has to buy new panels, the difference between the below-market price on the sale of the old panels and the price of the unnecessary new panels will be borne by the taxpayers. This is outright theft.
Incidentally, the theft from the taxpayers doesn’t lie in that $5 starting price, which is the required starting bid for all federal property, so that’s not where the wrongful activity is. Instead, what the government is doing amounts to theft because it is intentionally dumping federal property that the incoming president intends to use and will need to repurchase at market price.
There is no reason why the wall segments cannot be sold “as is, where is.” My friend, Anony Mee, knows the ins and outs of these things and explained how these sales work, including that $5 minimum bid. When the government is selling portable things it seized (e.g., cars, boats, jewelry, etc.), those can and should be sold out of the warehouses in which they’ve been stored. However, there is nothing to stop these giant wall panels from being sold directly from their current location.
In other words, the whole purpose of moving these wall segments is to force additional costs on the federal government. Biden’s team is doing this to drive up the cost of a policy that Americans across the board, regardless of race, color, creed, home state, or political orientation, devoutly wish to see implemented.
Thankfully, the State of Texas has announced that it will buy up the wall sections the Biden administration is selling:
After The Daily Wire published an exclusive report revealing that the Biden administration was racing to sell off parts of the border wall before President-elect Donald Trump takes office, Texas GOP Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick fiercely declared his state was prepared to bid on every piece being sold and then give it directly to Trump.
[snip]
“Message their White House right now: I will bid on all of that wall and we will buy it in Texas and we will give it to Donald Trump,” he asserted. “So I’m gonna find out first thing in the morning where we are going to take the bid. I’ve got a billion dollars in my pocket to do it. I write the budget with (Texas state) Senator Joan Huffman. We have the money. We’re gonna have about $6 billion in our budget for border security. We’ll buy it.”
Even better, now that Texas has made that announcement, the government must stop the sale. Why? Because I learned something else from Anony Mee:
If GSA determines that there are no federal requirements for your excess personal property, it becomes surplus property and is available for donation to state and local public agencies and other eligible non-federal activities. Title 40 of the United States Code requires that surplus personal property be distributed to eligible recipients by an agency established by each State for this purpose, the State Agency for Surplus Property.
In other words, now that Texas has made its wishes known, the Biden administration must hand over those wall segments to Texas without requiring Texas to dip into its budget. That also means that the Biden administration must immediately stop spending taxpayer money to relocate those wall segments.
What I want to know right now is who ordered this sale. This is a very important question. One of the main problems with a bureaucratic state is that we routinely hear that “the administration” did this or “an agency (or department) did that.”
However, all these decisions come from people, whether individuals or committees. By hiding behind the entity, these people never face consequences for their actions. If DOGE is serious about ending government waste, one of the first things it must do is put a person’s name on every wasteful, corrupt, partisan, and illegal decision “the government” makes.
Normally, a fish rots from the head, so it’s enough to hang the name on the administration's leader or the specific agency’s head. However, things have gotten so bad in D.C., and the rot has traveled so far down the fish that all actors (not peons but actors with decision-making authority) must be named and shamed and, if appropriate, fired or prosecuted.
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